Craig DeForest (Boulder, Colorado)

IMAGING THE SOLAR WIND FROM SUN TO EARTH

Free electrons scatter incident light, in a process worked out by the discoverer of the electron, J.J. Thomson, in the 19th century. This process has been used since the 1930s to view the solar corona by sunlight scattered off of the free electrons in it. Recently, several instruments have been built, planned, and proposed to exploit Thomson scattering off of the far more tenuous solar wind. Recently developed techniques for image processing and background subtraction are allowing the first photometric imaging of the solar wind itself and the space weather phenomena embedded in it. The process yields spectacular movies that reveal large, gossamer structures that, prior to STEREO/HI, could only be inferred from in-situ probes. I will briefly cover the physics and post-processing techniques that enable these exciting new results, and give an overview of recent results on the Sun-Earth connection and the origin of variability in the solar wind.